As any good provider of managed marketing solutions will tell you, the way to maximize the volume of traffic coming to your website is to leverage both organic search and paid search strategies. Each of these forms of digital marketing has their own distinct advantages and in this post, I’m going to share some ideas as to how you can use and integrate them to boost marketing effectiveness.
How to Benefit from Paid Search
As marketing company founder and CEO Jonathan Long explains in his Huffington Post article (8 Paid Search Marketing Tips for Beginners), the big benefit of paid search (or PPC as it is commonly known) is that it makes your website easy to find by displaying it prominently at the top of search engine results pages. Of course the expertise of your local St Charles or St Louis SEO company can get you there too, but SEO takes time to deliver results whereas paid search puts you at the top of results pages fast.
However, holding prominent placement in search engine results isn’t guaranteed to drive traffic to your website. To succeed in getting clicks on your PPC advertisements, you need to take care of the following requirements:
- Set a realistic budget (you will be charged every time someone clicks on your ads)
- Develop a competitive bid strategy to get the best advertising slots
- Set clear goals for your paid search campaigns
- Decide which search platform/s will best help you meet your goals
- Perform in-depth keyword research
- Create attention-grabbing copy for your advertisements
- Ensure your advertisements drive traffic to the most relevant pages on your website
- Implement conversion tracking and remarketing
- Continuously test and adjust your strategy
As you might surmise from this list of requirements, using paid search is not something you can take a fire-and-forget approach to, at least not if you want to receive a return on your investment.
If your primary business commitments keep you too busy to pay much attention to these points, placing them in the hands of a managed marketing solutions partner can help you benefit from paid search without being distracted from core business activities.
How to Derive Benefits from SEO
A writer for Search Engine Watch, Ashley Zeckman, reported on an important study into website traffic origins. The title of Ashley’s article, Organic Search Accounts for Up to 64% of Website Traffic, really says it all. While paid search can drive traffic to your website if you develop and execute a good strategy, the majority of your visitors will come from organic search engine links. That’s why it’s essential to pay attention to improving search engine rankings or let a local provider of SEO in St Charles handle it for you.
As previously mentioned, reaching the top of organic search engine page results isn’t something that happens overnight. Integrating paid search into your online marketing strategy is a useful way to make sure people find and visit your site during the early days, while you concentrate on organic growth by the application of SEO techniques, some of which include:
- Strategically using the keywords most relevant to your audience
- Regularly publishing authoritative, useful and engaging content
- Developing your website to make it easy to use and provide a positive experience for visitors
- Optimizing your website for mobile devices and local search
- Generating internal and external links to your web pages
- Actively engaging in social media marketing
If you’re able to work hard with these techniques, you might be looking at 100 or so organic page visits per day after three or four months of launching a new website. That’s according to social media author and speaker Bill Belew, writing on the topic in his article (Case Study: How Long Does It Take to See Organic Search Results?) for Search Engine Journal.
Integrate Organic Search and Paid Search
Barney Garcia contributes to the VerticalResponse Blog and in a 2015 post called 5 Ways to Use Paid Search & SEO Together, he reported on how businesses are increasingly integrating organic and paid search for a more unified digital marketing approach.
For example, because paid search campaigns tend to show results pretty quickly, they can serve as a great testbed for SEO keywords and content. There’s a good chance that topics, headlines and keywords that get decent results in paid search will also do so when used in organic content marketing. Conversely, if you see that certain content topics or keywords aren’t helping your sales, you’ll know not to invest too much effort on using them for SEO.
Need a Little Help?
Integrating organic and paid search marketing is a great way to get your business found online and to generate leads and conversions. Of course you have to devote the time and resources to create campaigns and maintain continuous SEO efforts.
If you believe this might be a stretch for your small business, it might be worth your while to engage a company offering managed marketing solutions, to work with you on strategy development and execution.
Changescape Web specializes in managed marketing, website design, and search engine optimization for St Charles and St Louis small-business owners. To find out about our managed marketing solutions, just complete and submit our fast and easy online inquiry form or contact us by phone at 636.947.6200.
